Month: September 2025

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Library & Museum Welcomes New Interns for 2025-26

Christopher Hodapp

The Masonic Library & Museum of Indiana has been blessed this year with a group of three interns from the Indiana University Museum Studies Master’s Degree Program. Nathan Dowell, Lauren Freije, and Taylor Pastor began their Work Study duties in early August. For the Fall 2025 semester, the Museum is open and staffed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10AM until 4PM, at least through the beginning of next year.

Nathan kicked off his time by putting together a display of lodge and grand lodge lapel pins from all over the country using a combination of donated pin collections. He is currently developing a new exhibit of fraternal ceremonial swords from the Knights Templar.

After several false starts by others over the years, Lauren and Taylor have taken on the herculean task of cataloging our more than 4,000 books. We’re extremely pleased to report that they are making rapid progress in just the first few weeks of work.

Library Cataloging Project
Masonry is a funny subject when it comes to the Dewey Decimal System used by almost all general-interest and academic libraries. Our fraternity with its thousands of books available barely occupies two-tenths of a decimal point in Dewey’s classification. Frustrated Masonic librarians over the decades sought to solve this problem by creating their own numbering system that had plenty of subject categories to handle nearly every niche of interests within our fraternity. (Unique library numbering systems aren’t new – specialty medical libraries have the same problem.) Unfortunately, three different sets of frustrated Masonic librarians in the U.S. all approached the subject by independently creating three completely different systems that can’t talk to each other. The one we adopted decades ago is the Steele-Davis-Tatsch numbering system, which is also used by the libraries at the grand lodges of Massachusetts and Missouri, who have shared their catalogs with us.

This laborious project involves looking at each volume, copying the publication details and descriptions from one of several online resources or our antiquated card catalog, discovering whether a prior Masonic library has issued a call number for that book in the Steele-Davis-Tatsch system, printing a new label with that number, and affixing it to the book. Now, repeat this 4,000 times and enter it all in our Past Perfect catalog system.

Ultimately, the catalog will be made available online so researchers can search our online database and discover everything we have available.

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New Informative Lobby Graphics

We have installed all new graphics in the lobby that provide a wealth of information in limited space. A series of panels display a timeline of Masonic history, from the days of its operative past through major changes over the centuries. This includes the formation of the first grand lodge of speculative Masonry in London in 1717, Masonry’s expansion across America, and the founding of the Grand Lodge of Indiana in 1818. It follows the fraternity’s growth all the way through the 1950s, right up to today.

Two panels are devoted to debunking the most commonplace myths and misconceptions about Masonry, while another shows the various appendant organizations that make up the wider family of Freemasonry. A separate panel displays the different buildings that have been home to the Grand Lodge since 1818. This includes the Schofield House, plus the three successive Indianapolis Masonic Temples that have commanded prominent positions in the capital city’s history ever since 1850.

 

Prince Hall Freemasonry Display

This year marks the 27th year since the Grand Lodge F&AM of Indiana and the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge F&AM of Indiana agreed on mutual recognition. Many of our guests have heard the term ‘Prince Hall Masons’ without knowing its meaning or significance. A new display tells the story of Prince Hall, the free black Boston leather worker who became the founder of Freemasonry for the black community in 1776. His African Lodge 457, which was chartered by the Premiere Grand Lodge of England in 1784, was the first black lodge in America.

The display also describes the spread of so-called Negro Freemasonry across the country and the foundation of the Independent Union Grand Lodge of Indiana in 1855, the precursor to the Prince Hall Grand Lodge in our state (their name was changed in 1944). And it tells the story of their founding Grand Master, John G. Britton, a manumitted slave who came to Indiana in the 1830s as a barber. Interestingly, his first newspaper advertisement in Vincennes, Indiana appeared during the height of the Morgan Excitement and the Anti-Masonic period. Britton hilariously states in the ad that he will “remodify the kingdom of the anti-Masons as to render the subjects thereof glad to have escaped with their lives”!

He relocated to Indianapolis in the 1830s and married Chaney Lively, Indianapolis’ first black citizen who arrived as a servant to Alexander Ralston, the city’s original designer. The Brittons were a respected couple in the city’s social scene and became the founders of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the oldest black congregation in the city. John Britton went on to be a representative of the state’s black citizens at the convention to rewrite the Indiana Constitution held in 1851 at the brand-new Indianapolis Masonic Temple. He was elected Grand Master of the Independent Union Grand Lodge when it formed in 1856.